"For nearly 2.3 million residents of the Southern California region drinking-water supplies are located within 50 of the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant," said Emily Rusch, CALPIRG's Education Fund State Director. "That's a concern because, as we learned from last year in Fukushima, Japan, drinking water sources can become contaminated in the event of an accident or underground leak."

Massachusetts Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren and Jon Stewart discussed U.S. PIRG and Citizens for Tax Justice's new report, Representation Without Taxation, on the January 24th edition of the Daily Show. The report outlines the "Dirty 30", corporations that spent more money lobbying congress than they paid in taxes between 2008-2010. U.S. PIRG and CTJ released the report to mark the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates for corporate influence in our government, as well as to highlight the need to fix the tax code to force corporations to pay their fair share.

Phineas Baxandall at the US Public Interest Research Group, a non-partisan advocacy, says the trend toward privatising the enforcement of traffic laws poses inherent conflicts of interest. Municipalities typically sign up because they are strapped for cash. When the contract involves revenue-sharing between the vendor and the municipality, there is an incentive to issue more tickets than necessary. But even flat-fee contracts can cause problems, if the system is implicitly tuned to recoup that fee by, in effect, setting a quota of tickets to be issued.